First, inhale this Surreal vision of Full House-era “fun,” ritualistic/orgiastic mastication, overconsumption, and, uh, mozzarella:

Tasty.

Now—with no pants on but plenty of flow, Die Antwoord are everyone’s favorite post-genre quasi-hip hop sex-obsessed musical… act? Are they an act a la bunraku? (The “real man” behind the Ninja is visibly, ironically puppet-mastering the Ninja—floppy cartoon penis, mullet/fade, and all?) Or are they more like Andy Kaufmann? (The “real” comedy act will begin as soon as I’m done reading the entire Great Gatsby out loud; the “real” Die Antwoord are always at the edges of themselves, of being-what-you-thought-they-would-be?) Who knows. The end result is fokken rad music, not to mention the awesome, wild, aesthetics-defying, sexuality-trumping, eye-bombing video:

Just as the erotic flees into the unknown, the obscured, and the secret, so does it return like a flood (”of what,” he asks, with a wink) at the call of the maximal and the cartoonishly intimate (sexy with a wink, “sexy,” the Robert Coover version of sex, sex as joke, as game). This maximal return is elegantly and hilariously incarnated (pun intended) in “Evil Boy.” Good show. Or, should I say, good “show?”—

The erotic, like the violent, like the gastro-orgiastic, defies simulation: Cartoonish, silly, ironic/self-aware “sex” or “pizza orgy” still produces in us the desire for sex, for pizza. No matter how silly the pizza obliteration party becomes, the pizza cannot be obliterated and in fact expands, conceptually, to consume the song, the obliteration. Or:

The Pizza Song (original and screwed) always effectively generates hunger, especially for junk food. It obliterates not “pizza,” some noble Italian culinary art, but “the obliteration of pizza.” It negates its own joke, the way that “sex” in “Evil Boy” negates the idea that “we’re going to have a larf with all these wooden cocks and this eyelash-less bird in a silly fur coat.” These videos are both so maximal, they overcome themselves.

Here the erotic finds and joins the gastro-orgiastic (and the violent—see: Tarantino, Oliver Stone…) and becomes simply the Beyond, that which lies beyond our ability to taxonomize, be really aware of, hold in our thoughts abstractly.

For to truly contemplate desire or hunger is to feel horny or want to eat: Any other “knowledge” of this animal non-knowledge is exactly what it wants least to be, a joke. The joke in supra-maximal art is that it is both actually funny and “funny,” or deadly serious—the last laugh of the corpse; the pizza-stuffed buffoon, off to a nap; the mid-coitus man and woman who have traded the sign of sex for sex, and then traded sex for the ultimate erotic (the unknown), which leaves them with nothing else, only laughter…

Check out this short essay on the question of self as posed by V. S. Ramachandran, one of my favorite writer–scientists (along with, recently, Carl Elliott). In the post: morality and dystopia.

Some Rama-sentences I admire:

…Maybe the solution to the problem of the self won’t be a straightforward empirical one. It may instead require a radical shift in perspective, the sort of thing that Einstein did when he rejected the assumption that things can move at arbitrarily high velocities.

When we finally achieve such a shift in perspective, we may be in for a big surprise and find that the answer was staring at us all along…

There are curious parallels between this idea and the Hindu philosophical view that there is no essential difference between self and others or that the self is an illusion.

Inspiration is a strange beast, and it comes shambling out of the shadows of the strangest nooks (books, movie posters, coronas of a women’s hair on the subway, long quiet moments in street, in the rain, &c.).

Recently I find myself more and more drawn to/inspired by animals, what animals are. What are they? They are an open question, or a series of open questions. I find them a series of forms that at once seem always-familiar and always-alien, like Barthes’s dream of knowing a dream-language, a language you know but cannot understand.

(Typified, for him, by Japanese, a language I once could understand, strangely enough; now my half-forgotten fluency is a type of dream-code, and I find it inspiring in a different way. But to return to animals…)

Trying to find out about one animal leads inevitably to others. From one morphological question, another arises; the answers mirror each other in new ways (extinct Caspian lions with flat faces, the masks of bay owls, the facelessness of moles, or moreover of cnidarians, of microbes…).

Courtesy Wikipedia, here are a few threads of bird-ness, of bird-multiplicity, that I’ve found inspiring today:

• [This one is amazing enough to quote without paraphrase:] “Vulture stomach acid is exceptionally corrosive, allowing them to safely digest putrid carcasses infected with Botulinum toxin, hog cholera, and anthrax bacteria that would be lethal to other scavengers.”
• Their stomach acid also enables vultures to “use their reeking, corrosive vomit as a defensive projectile when threatened.” Maybe explains not keeping vultures as pets?
• There is an owl called the fearful owl.
• There is an eagle called the changeable hawk-eagle. Doth it transform, eagle-to-hawk, hawk-to-eagle? Be it a Decepticon?
• A group of vultures is a wake. [I might have known this, but seeing it again caused me to pause and consider what a great name it is: The wake for the dead, the activity proper to the vulture, consumes their lives; they are master wake-sitters, forever nibbling in prayer.]
• A group of owls is a parliament. [Again, I had read this somewhere, but wtf. Owls are solitary hunters, no? For them to engage in parliament seems both unlikely.]
• The feathers of flight are the remiges. One of them is a remex. Beautiful words, both.
• The feathers known as alula or bastard wing feathers are not flight feathers. They allow birds to achieve a greater angle of attack without stalling. They are like the movable slats on the wings of airplanes.
• The tail feathers are the rectrices. One of them is a rectrix.

What the hell. I found that refreshing!

Now check out, Dear Avian-Enlightened Reader, this awesome long-eared owl:

Awesome long-eared owl photo by Mindaugas Urbonas.

I wrote this post ages ago but never published it. Presumably it is unfinished. Presumably, however, all small meditations are the comprehensible unfinished eggs of longer meditations, the “compleat” meditations that dwell in our heads and keep us up at night. When I finally have time to write them all down, I will either be not working or dead, or possibly both. In any event, here is one egg, born of an old pop rock song and a train ride:

One night, I heard a very young couple on the train arguing about the lyrics of an Oasis song I had not heard since middle school. Like Proust’s tea-soggy Madeleine, the words of the song brought me back in time and space as I sat perfectly still. I smelled the mosquito-thickened, pine-scented air of Atlanta. (I wondered, what the fuck is a wonderwall?)

Later, on a gloomy N train back from Queens, listening to Outkast and Akrobatik and Elliott Smith in my head, I thought I understood something of that early feeling of love for a love song, or belief that a love song can change your life, or even that it can say anything about your life; that a song can serve as a precis of all you hold in your secret heart.

The internal architecture (the dream-bones) of the song persist not because they have the life-stuff of an essay, a love letter, or a good honest fuck-you phone call, or even a fuck-off offering online (status update, profile deletion), but because they tend to make sense of out of nonsense, and to comfort us exactly when and where no comfort’s due—and to do so all on their own magical terms.

In this way, the song is always dishonest, a black magic, a dream magic—or at least the under-practiced hedge-cantrip of a matchmaker, favorite aunt, former best friend, advice columnist, or other romantically unworthy vizier.

The song’s bones persist because they call into play their own persistence; they are un-humble, selfish things, songs—like hungry beetles or hungrier, beetle-seeking spiders.

When it’s really raining out, you can see the run-off from abandoned ballads running down Ocean Avenue. The loose words (”angel,” “custard,” brands of liquor, units of time, rubble from the palaces of lost memory) get stuck under tires, like fluttering moths.

• Inception, 2010
• Paprika, 2006
• Vanilla Sky, 2001
• Waking Life, 2001
• Abre los ojos (Open Your Eyes), 1997

Five points, five elements, five fingers, rubbing the tired eyes back to reality…

There are so many more dream movies, of course. 8 ½ is a personal favorite, if more a flashbacky/daydreamy movie than a dreamy movie pur sang. The movie is, overall, a beautiful way to send someone into that dreamlike state, the demi-torpor of the child-whose-attention-has-been-captured, the lover affixed to the beloved’s inscrutable, lovely eyes.

Here I would be remiss not to mention the dream literature (De Quincey, Kafka’s journals) that has inspired so many of these dreaming–am–I–dreaming? acts of cinephrenia, in which we descend continually through layers of the dream, searching for that paradoxical oneiromancy that will, oroboros, cast us back up from the dream, into that waking dream, consciousness. (In Inception, this dream-extinguishing is called the Kick.)

Frankly, looking back at recent dream-cinema, I’m surprised they still haven’t made/fucked up a Sandman movie yet…

Tigers, sexuality, and massive plants—yep, that sounds about right. Here we have The Dream by Henri Rousseau…

Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat contorts words and settles for ignorant proto-definitions, preferring to fall back upon easy “truths” (”America is inclusive;” “America is a Christian nation”) rather than tackle a world that is both complex and, moreover, rigorously ambiguous (America can be both inclusive and exclusive; it is especially inclusive if you are already in the pecuniary–white–male–&c. majority; America is partly Christian, and Christians have a disproportionately loud public voice, compared to, say, American Hindus, Muslims, or Sikhs).

This week Douthat takes the cake today, however, by weighing in on the debate over the new mosque that will be built near Ground Zero. Douthat sticks his foot so far down his mouth, his Pumas will permanently reek of juice d’digestif.

In his latest masterpiece, Douthat defines America dichotomously: Ours, he says, is a nation with two major components, often (apparently) at odds:

1. The Constitution, which he interprets more or less sanely as our best hope of protection against men such as himself
2. “American culture,” which he defines as “Christian”—in fact, Protestant—and English-speaking

So far, so wrong. But nothing new here.

Where Douthat goes off the deepest end is in his judgment that, in some cases, so-called “American culture” should triumph over the Constitution.

He says, for example, that the “second America” (”American culture,” in his jargon—why he numerically delineates his “Americas” is beyond me) should “press for something more from Muslim Americans than simple protestations of good faith…”

Good faith that… what?

That their mosque is not, gasp!, secretly a C.O.B.R.A. headquarters, brimming with red-lasering Islamo-Fascist bad dudes?

My mind is blown, every time I read a request like this one. “Minority: Defend my unfounded attack on your place of worship! Defend yourself from my accusation that you are malingering against me!” It’s not just unfair, it’s sadly hilarious.

How can Muslim Americans hope to appease the Douthats of their nation? They frankly can’t. They cannot participate in fully one half of America, by Douthat’s definition, and why should they want to? If anything, it is this exclusionary rhetoric that drives “moderate Muslims” to identify more with repressed Muslim populations outside the United States than with “real Americans” like Douthat.

After requesting that Muslim Americans explain and comport themselves better, going forward, Douthat hits absolute logical rock-bottom. And he must have been proud to do so. I can just picture Douthat fist-pumping victoriously after putting the polishes on his conclusion—namely that, “while the ideals of the first America protect the e pluribus, it’s the demands the second America makes of new arrivals that help create the unum.”

On first-read, this is just so much fluff. The majority must protect minorities, but those minorities must not piss of the majority. French-style democracy. Okay, I get it. I don’t like it; it’s un-friggin-American—but I get it.

But read this conclusive sentence again, this time plugging in Douthat’s own terms:

“While the ideals of [the Constitution] protect the e pluribus, it’s the demands [that Christian, Protestant, anglophone American culture] makes of new arrivals that help create the unum.”

What—really, dog? Really?

So, the Native Americans just fucked up, huh? Their bad? And the African peoples who were brought to America against their will? They should have just… gone with the flow? They should have gone to church, learned to enjoy Ethan Frome like the rest of us good Calvinists? You’re kidding me, right?

This is acceptable to you, conservatives? And, liberals, why is this dude writing in the Times?

America is not a “Christian nation,” and Christians cannot demand that Muslims wear a special star or pay a special non-Christian tax—or change their building plans because the “second America” have somehow reserved all of downtown Manhattan as a memorial.

President Obama and Mayor Bloomberg were right to defend the rights of Muslim Americans in New York City. Douthat should offer a redaction of his thinly veiled bigotry.

Calvin said, “There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make men rejoice.” He would probably not have approved of the new mosque, but still. Good looks on that blade of grass thing.

At least according to Beach House ’s phenomenal “Walk in the Park,” by Allen Cordell, on Vimeo:

Recently I saw Steve Asma talk about monsters; soonafter, my friend Steve Aubrey, editor of the Suspicious Anatomy, sent me the above wolfboy/zombie-esque bully video. I find the action of it mesmerizing. Perhaps all good stories end in sandwiches, metaphorical or otherwise…

In any event, fur and psychedelia are here to stay, as chimerical monsters and taxidermy and vampires and werewolves all make comebacks—and the truly monstrous (per Asma’s excellent On Monsters) recede into the cold and psychological, the realm of Arendt and To Catch a Predator.

In lighter news, the monstrous unconscious comes forward in art… and liquor. Behold! The truly chimerical—the not-alive/not-dead/not-human/not-beast—the zombierific—is now available as a seven-hundred-dollar craft beer with a button nose and a tuxedo:

Aww, thanks, BrewDog… a pet-koozie. I guess I have always wanted a stuffed dog to hold my hair of the dog*. (*There’s a “yo dawg” iteration in there somewhere, but I don’t have time to figure it out right now.)

More strange doubling…

What is X?

(But really—we’ll GET you, you hovertrucker…)

The CIA has a page for kids (thanks to Chris T. for pointing this out) that hilariously misuses (or, should i say, “misuses”) quotation marks:

Welcome. We’re glad you’re here to learn more about the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA is an independent US government agency that provides national security “intelligence” to key US leaders so they can make important, informed decisions. CIA employees gather intelligence (or information) in a variety of ways, not just by “spying” like you see in the movies or on TV (though we do some of that, too).

Italicizing or bolding these words would have worked better… I think they think the quotation marks are “clarifying” because they “highlight” key spy “lingo.”

But given, oh, you know, critical US “intelligence” “failures”—9/11, Saddam’s not having WMDs after all, the Afghanis not welcoming us (surprise!) as liberators and bearers of heroic Freedom Fries, &c.—the marks come off as “ironic” and “mocking,” or rather “sadly hilaaarious.”

The creepiest rhetoric bon-mot here is the final admonition to the youth that yes, the CIA have real movie-quality spies, not no bullshit rent-a-spy fools in cheap tuxedos, but real laser-watch carrying badasses.

In fact, the Company’s brilliantest “intelligencers” may be right behind you, spying after all—watching you Google naughty pictures of Megan Fox and the Avatar pseudo-ladies…

Little wonder we can smuggle sensitive “intelligence” out of critical installations in Central Asia by pretending the classified info is a Lady Gaga album. Hilaaaaaaaaarious…

The spy urinal. (?) No idea. This is what came up when I Googled “spy Wikimedia” in hopes of getting an old, rights-expired photo of a Russian guy hatcheting an anarchist or something.

That’s Jeff Vilencia’s first art house movie, made in 1992, courtesy Hugh Raffles (Insectopedia). Says Raffles of the whole intriguing philosophical quandary of squishing living things:

The Supreme Court decision of April 20, 2010, voiding HR 1887, the so-called “crush video law,” by an 8-1 majority, provoked an intense and immediate response, summarised in this article in The Huffington Post. Mary Tieffenbrunn wrote this piece in The News-Gazette.

What is unknown or is fragile is erotic. I can imagine a whole compendium of fragile-skinned, differently-insided squishables (and therefore objects-erotic). Sushi, meatball, eclair. And of course the the grape, the furry animal, the easy stand-in for the organ…

Gross, but who doesn’t love to squish stuff? Think of Burroughs’s exterminator tragic heroes… Roach-stamp, bubblewrap-pop, tomato-burst: These are the uneasy loves of some universal, unconscious imp with big feet. A new supervillain: SQUISHOR.

…Or Stimpy. Maybe we all are a little Stimpy in taste, somewhere in there…

In the last week, I’ve been directed to enjoy not only Six Versions Of Blood Meridian by Zak Smith, Sean McCarthy, John Mejias, Craig Taylor, Shawn Cheng, and Matt Wiegle, but also One Drawing For Every Page Of Moby-Dick by Matt Kish. (Zak Smith also created Illustrations For Each Page Of Gravity’s Rainbow.)

Why these massifications of mass? Cormac McCarthy’s epic and Melville’s—upon which McCarthy’s is founded—are both highly visual, detailed, colorful, painterly works. Their stories (the authorized versions) are clear, even if their meanings will be debated for as long as humans are around to debate.

Ah, but here’s the genius of translation. Translation is not repetition for another audience, not performance, but re-creation, re-playing God.

Look at A Humument by Tom Phillips. Phillips admits the book out of whose guts his own visual-poetic masterpiece is painstakingly stitched is trash. He does not translate Mallock’s A Human Document, because that translation would be worse than unmoving; it would be offensive to a modern audience. Instead, he uses the field of signs of A Human Document to create an ongoing series of paintings, to tell new stories, to comment on the original, the author thereof, and the era that produced them both.

Or… he translates the book out of the book: Translates it into the painting; then out of the painting and into the multimedia product-event. A Humument has been published four times; you can buy prints of it from Phillips’s website; the book continues to grow, existing outside of time.

(Which iteration is definitive? This is the happy problem of Leaves of Grass, the bible, and all those classic unfinished texts, from The Castle to those last revisions of À la recherche du temps perdu, from Nabokov’s final emission to the unfinishable, shifting rhizomes of the internet—Wikipedia and its shadows [Uncyclopedia], any forum, the Atlas Obscura, this site…)

Two works I’ve written about here before also merge the media of “book” (word, story, argument, linearity, sound, consciousness-as-lighting-upon, abstraction and forms and modules of thoughts) and “art” (color, moment, muteness, instant all-comprehensibility, the unconscious-as-perceiving-everything, figuration and line and negative space).

What is Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini? Is it a book of “art” (a joke on us), or a “real” fictional encyclopedia (self-coherent, non-rules-breaking, so “realistic” as far as alien encyclopediae go)? Has the content of the Codex been translated from the alien, or into it? Can you articulate the distinction?

Book From The Sky by Xu Bing provides a final and I think highly molecular example. Xu made, over four years, a mesmerizing set of fake Chinese pictograms. They are technically ”devoid of semantic content” but so suggestive of content that these “pictures” of words serve as pseudo-words a la Serafini’s squiggles in the Codex, but moreso. (The Sky-words are made from elements which are real; Serafini’s squiggles can be examined at a microscopic level, but they yield if anything less meaning.)

Again, has Xu translated a book out of the infinite/infinitely strange heavens? Or has he translated human words into a higher form? Is the book so mesmerizing, for Chinese readers and non-Chinese readers alike, because it suggests we humans can never mean anything (the original title was An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century), or because we make meaning from everything, because we translate and transmediate everything?

I think books inspire pictures and music automatically, and vice versa. As I write, Deltron fades into Devendra Banhart, and I am surrounded by the postcards whose meanings (semantic, semiotic) I have forgotten but whose figures and negative spaces and limits and patterns call out to me to write a story about a pair of leopards who trade their spots with the clouds and so doom great blotches of sahel-grass to deadly shade…

And are the Japanese Jewish?—asks this great Pink Tentacle post, from a series on Japanese urban legends. Even with the urban-legend disclaimer, the wording of the post repeatedly assumes that there really is (or was) an Ark of the Covenant.

I wonder why we feel the need even to speculate about “lost artifacts” and apocryphal heroes. Do we find it cathartic to imagine that there was a Seal of Sulayman, a Rod of Aaron, a Sword of Roland—at some point—and we’ve merely degenerated, been scattered in an ur-diaspora (courtesy Babel, the Deluge), losing our physical links back to the Divine?

That any one of us could find tomorrow our own Lost Tablet or Holy Horseshoe and so become the future Sulayman, Frodo, or Per-Ce-Val—”Through the Veil,” the vale of the shadow of mortality, through all the way to the gnostic-mysterious Origin of our very Being?

The Japanese talkshow clip is pure entertainment, of course, as is the first Indiana Jones. The whole Pink Tentacle post is entertainment. But the comments reveal how seriously and variously we take questions of national identity and religious ipseity.

For me, the convergence of entertainment and serious give-a-shit-ness is where fiction comes in. These “fabled lost somethingerother of Ancientplace!” para-connections between remote peoples and times make for great fiction, unless Dan Brown hears about them. (My favorite consequence of the search for the [Japanese] Ark: The government named the supposed Ark-locus “Tsurugi-san Quasi-National Park.”)

And, yes, if some lost Middle Eastern influence did end up all the way on the remote slopes of Tsurugi-san in Shikoku—if the Ark did indeed cometh out of Israel or Babylon, then somehow into Japan—I would want to know more, as a historian—a conscientious fabulist, playing around with a limited set of signs-of-things-that-supposedly-happened, drawn from certain sets of texts.

But I wonder just how many other schizoid theories there are out there—of the secret still-attainable flat earth/lost tribe/Dead Sea Powerscroll/ancient biblical ninja powersword/lost Powerthirst flavor (Ark Lite), and so on—floating around, begging to be entertained, like Tourette’s-afflicted children, in Japan and here in New York—and especially on the internet. The number must be staggering.

Eventually, we must all be the “lost tribe” of some other tribe, one not lost to itself.

Wikipedia is a powerful artistic tool. It contains so much trivia, so many odd images and unexpected connections, that it’s never the same site, visit to visit. It’s a rippling pond of weirdness, and I love it.

One of the textual methods Wikipedia best captures for us is exhaustion. Wikipedian (Wikipedic?) lists return to the Renaissance encyclopedia-of-everything method of gathering information—including even things that don’t quite fit. Every story, every myth, every stray possibility gets its own subhead, its five seconds of obscure fame.

(Aside: The paradox of modern nerd culture is that it makes “famous” the niche; obscurity is denied to everything. In a perversion of Warhol’s maxim, people aren’t more likely to become truly famous, only to be denied the invisibility of the unappreciated outsider-creator. Today, an F. Kafka would be doing interviews with David Remnick and selling silk-screened HUNTER GRACCHUS shirts on Etsy.)

My favorite exhaustive list so far is the Wikipedical (?) list of methods of divination, which methods are stupendously legion in sheer number and in category (”selenomancy,” moon-scrying, being a spawner of many imitators). Here are a few faves:

• macharomancy: divination by swords or knives
• rumpology (also natimancy): divination by buttocks
• tyromancy: divination by cheese
• transataumancy: divination by things accidentally seen or heard
• cosquinomancy: divination by hanging sieves
• cephaleonomancy: divination by boiling a donkey’s head

How you divine the future using buttocks (yours? a handy assistant’s?), I don’t know.

But the donkey’s head thing sounds appropriately occult. Might be hard to convince the NYPD you’re just scrying the foggy shore of What’s To Come, of course, when they show up and ask about the missing donkey and the mysterious smell. But potentially worth it—esp. if the donkey’s head speaks to you (in Latin? backwards Latin?), telling your fortune/the fortune of your buttocks.